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Posts tagged with the category Improving Performance

The Need for Organizational Learning is Now

In Kathia Laszlo’s May 2nd post, she spoke to the critical need to rethink and expand boundaries within a system to support different ways of working and learning together. The need to create organizational cultures where learning together is the norm has never been so important as it is during this time of increasing complexity and change....

Re-Looping to Add Conversations?

Rare is the time to chat in our workday, don’t you think?
The other day I sat with Brian, my organization’s director of educational services, and Kelly, our enrollment coordinator. We engaged in something unusual: a casual, unstructured conversation in the workplace.
The topic was something particularly jazzy to those of you born to...

Paying Attention

Everything I read points to the need for attention for our brains to develop new neurons and synapses, and I've been wondering about awareness and attention. Mindfulness practice is an awareness and attention practice where we build our capacity to pay attention by stopping our activity and focusing on our direct and immediate experience.
We...

(ONE)+ = (YOU + ME) LOVE

Momentum in manufacturing happens if the marketing "stars" align and the bullwhip effect has been tamed.
If you work in supply chain management or recall your MBA days, maybe you remember the Near Beer study? Forio.com provides not only a wonderful explanation of the conundrum framed by the study but also offers a nice (but...

Personal Resilience as a Response to Trauma: Recovery or Transformation?

The March 28th edition of New York Times magazine had a deeply inspiring article about some unique programs being adopted by the U.S. Army to help returning war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead of medical treatment and therapy, the programs focus on activating a natural capacity of the human being for growth, learning, and...

Team Work and the Role of Reflection

Reflection is one of the hardest things for leaders to implement.
Even if leaders knew the value of reflection, it would be hard to implement. As it is, reflection is an unknown capacity that has enormous potential to accelerate learning. According to Jack Mezirow, founder of transformative learning theory, without reflection, there is no learning...

Innovation as Tension Resolution

David Straus, founder of Interaction Associates, defined a problem as "a situation someone wants to change." I kept wondering why it was so hard to get my daughter to keep her room clean until I realized that, given Straus' definition, only one of us has a problem. That is, only one of us wants the situation to change.
Situation...

Organizational Lifecycles and the Renewal Stage

Like humans, organizations develop and evolve.
Organizational development follows a defined lifecycle, from inception to maturity to eventual decay if operations cease.
Forty-six percent of organizations generally fold within a year-and-a-half of opening. The ones that remain in business generally average a median lifespan of seven years.
So...

More About Corporations as Engaged Citizens: A Reflection from Italy

I write this entry while living and working from Cefalù, Sicily, a town not only steeped in centuries-old tradition, but part of one of the countries currently struggling to survive as a member of the European Union.
Evidenced by the hand waves and chatter in the streets, people in Cefalù know each other and have a communal identity...

Inquiry

I’ve learned some new things about inquiry recently. I’ve been working with inquiry for some time and I love learning new ways of practicing. The three things I learned came from my research in neuroscience.
I have been reading Allan Schore’s 1994 book, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional...